Wither subscription-based content?

With the New York Times' discontinuation of its Times Select experiment, whereby readers paid to access the Times' exclusive columnists, and the buzz of anticipation that Rupert Murdoch will end paid access to the Wall Street Journal in the hopes of opening up wider advertising opportunities, it appears that the future of paid content is in question.

Witness this video of a panel discussion on the future of online advertising at the Ad Tech show in New York, where Arianna Huffington said that in the future, "what's going to be least important is subscription-based content...Unless it's pornography, and especially weird porn, don't charge for it." It was a clever line that drew laughs from the audience, but when it comes B2B, I'm not so sure we can put the nail in the coffin of paid content just yet.

Rather, as I've mentioned before, exclusive content available in a web-only format that cannot be replicated in print can be a big part of the future of online B2B media growth, and is worthy of our time and investment. I'm not talking Web-exclusive articles. I agree with Huffington that people just won't pay for words, no matter how good they are.

But they will pay for other forms of structured content. The most obvious example is structured databases of industry information, which database publishers have proffered for years. Trouble with that is the data business is so fundamentally different than the publishing business that most publishers have trouble making the mental leap.

But with audio, video and images, the Web opens up opportunities beyond data. Witness AdForum.com, a repository of television 75,000 commercials and 20,000 agencies from around the world. It charges $295 per year for access, and the videos are structured and searchable through a slick user interface. By the way, this is owned by Maydream, which is not a publishing company. Why didn't Ad Age come up with this Web site?

Another good example is Reel Exchange from Penton Media.

We're experimenting with a similar concept with our Global Package Gallery, which aims to be the largest online repository of high-resolution package images. We're just in launch mode now, so time will tell whether this is successful. But I can tell you that we will draw very little from our experience of selling ads and writing articles, which is all we've ever known. We're definitely flexing some new muscles.

But sniffing out these new opportunities, which are often right under our noses, requires an entirely different way of thinking about the markets that we serve. By the way, an excellent resource for getting the creative juices flowing is Russell Perkins' InfoCommerce Group. He runs an excellent conference and writes a great blog highlighting these types of business models.